It took me a long time to warm up to Bruce Springsteen--even though he was a star in the northeast before he began playing football stadiums nationwide, and even though he and I grew up in the same state, there was something about his music that seemed off-putting to me. It was only when the Born in the USA album went multi-multi-platinum that I learned to stop worrying and love Bruce Springsteen.
In retrospect, it was probably my fault that it took so long to appreciate "The Boss". The musical interests of my friends and I in high school predominately leaned towards British rock and its blues-based and arty offshoots. The Beatles, The Who, The Stones, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Yes were all favorites of my classmates and I, along with expatriate Jimi Hendrix, who merged American R&B with mid-sixties English power pop.
Bruce Builds On Pre-Beatles Rock
Springsteen's music was largely built on the same roots that these musicians also had, but his goal was to emulate American music pre-Beatles, not necessarily to create the same abstract psychedelic sonic landscapes so popular with the musicians that proceeded the Fab Four. To paraphrase something Keith Richards once said about the Stones, unlike many of his 1970s contemporaries, Springsteen, especially on his early albums, was as interested in the roll as the rock.
He developed a sonic vocabulary all his own, with a band that had an idiosyncratic sound eventually built around two keyboardists, two guitarists, and a sax player. And he wrote songs to fit those players, shaping his arrangements to suit the talents of the men in his band, rather than forcing them to play pre-written arrangements.
All of this is documented in Rikky Rooksby's new book, Bruce Springsteen: Songwriting Secrets. Rooksby is the author of How To Write Songs On Guitar, Inside Classic Rock Tracks, Melody, and other books focusing on post-1950s pop music.
Early in Bruce's career, he had a reputation in New Jersey bars as being a hip young guitar slinger, which eventually gave way to his songwriting prowess. What direction a guitarist goes in is something that most rock musicians must choose at some point in their careers, especially when most realize that they're not the second coming of Hendrix or Eddie Van Halen. There's a quote in Rooksby's book by "Miami" Steve Van Zandt, Springsteen's longtime lieutenant in the E Street Band, that sums up Bruce's decision, which led the way to his astonishing success as a writer:
By '72, pretty much everything had shifted to the songs. By '72, pretty much everything that could be done with the guitar had been done, with the exception of Eddie Van Halen, who had yet to come. What were you gonna do that Clapton, Beck, Page, and Hendrix hadn't done? However good a guitar player you were at that point, you now had to work within the context of the song: our guitar playing was gonna come in handy and be useful, but not so much to just go off on long solos to impress somebody anymore.
Is Springsteen Sexist?
Article comments